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digiKam's New Search Functions: A screencast

Submitted by Marcel on Tue, 2008-07-08 19:46

For the upcoming 0.10 version we have taken the step to completely rewrite the searching functionality, both the backend and the user interface. Our new database layout allows us to offer much more search options, as we now store in the database what we consider useful to the photographer, and storing in the database is prerequisite for searching.

The old search interface from the current stable KDE3 line 0.9 allowed to create quite complex logically combined queries, but had only a limited amount of information about a picture that it could actually search. When adding a lot more options, the UI would not scale well.

So we went ahead and designed a new user interface for searching (together with a new backend for creating searches and a private XML format to store a search in the database).
Here is the screencast:

We use stylesheets to make the dialog follow digikam's themeing (and not present a large empty gray space as the old one did) In some parts the dialog is inspired by web search engines' advanced search. But of course it's based on native widgets. I have put in some detail work playing with combo boxes (there are a lot of combo boxes but you dont see that), that's stuff for another more technical blog entry.

Update:
Youtube has blurred the video. The full version (OGG, 15MB) is here.